Forget that no one asks to be here, fault & collision.
Forget that I seem incapable of suffering, am
liable to break. The word fragile, the word
impassable, forget words simple, stranded as bones
I cannot swallow. Begging & tenor, the mono-
chrome Flats as tender ice Earth seems to be
curving away. What isn't snow is salt. What isn't
light is blinding. What isn't language is flesh
cut of the moon slowly rolling. A dying
lake can never recite every night every name
every star a blade dulled against another
ox's rib cage. Let there be no cairn
to the jagged trail of wagons. No line no child
draws in the sand. No, picture lonely more
precise. I have seen the smallest ones
urged first with gaunt & watering cheeks
to the bodies of the dead, crying forgive me
father, as mother turns away to chew
his last shoelace. The fire will roar but I cannot
stop the freeze, her turn, the sleep she'll sleep
without feeling both feet burn.
Char that I never sorry to say I plead. Winds
from such a height they never end. Winds
from such a height I never asked.
©
is the author of In the Carnival of Breathing, winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. Her poems have been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, scholarships to the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, and have appeared recently in Ninth Letter, Seneca Review, Third Coast, Best New Poets, and on Verse Daily. She teaches at the University of Utah, where she is poetry editor for Quarterly West.
